Susquehanna Blue Smoke

The barbecue battle, the boxing match, and other examples of ritualized warfare are here made literal.

This is actual combat, with uniforms and weapons and everything. The animals, naturally, reenact the Civil War and recast it in terms of combatants fighting for their chance to be eaten.

These aren't hobbyists playacting. This is that most terrible of all institutions: the art of war. And the stakes couldn't be higher.

Who can claim the title of conqueror? Whose banner will be hoisted on the rubble of victory? Who is the finest food?

Dixie Meat Rub

Even stuffed to bursting with the meat of his kinsmen, he has but one thought.

His abdomen taut, his pulse sluggish, his eyes heavy with impending slumber, he has just a singular idea buzzing in his spongy brain like a dozy bumblebee:

Must. Prepare. Self. For imminent eating. Must have rub. Applied to belly.

Unable to muster the energy to speak the words aloud, instead he thinks them into being. Rub my belly.

He pats his girth helpfully. "Here," he seems to say. "The rub goes right here." And then, before sinking into his pork coma, he prays you will know what to do with his lifeless body.








Addendum: Have we, perhaps, already seen this type of glutton (for punishment as well as for the meat of his own kind)? Yes, we have.

The Art of Ribs

The pig has agreed to pose for the impassioned artist because he is eager to see his true, inner self brought forth and captured for eternity. Like all sensitive souls, the pig is moved by the drive to experience the wonder, the sheer generative power of art.

So when the accomplished artist—you can gauge his skill by his beret, effete mustache, sandals, and the patch on his trousers—asked the pig to pose for him? Well, who could refuse?

And the result is everything the pig imagined! Just seeing his truest essence revealed is a natural poet's dream. And get a load of that truest essence! When the artist looks deep within the pig's trusting eyes, he sees… a big slab of bones and flesh cooking on the grill.

No subtle dance of emotion and thought. No questions gathered and scattered to the stars. No search for meaning. Just… a big thing of meat. Which, after all, is everything the pig hoped to see.








Addendum (1/02/11): More art-loving pigs.

27th Annual Barbecue Festival

Earlier this year, we profiled the 25th year of this Lexington, North Carolina, institution. Alas, our schedules are all out of sync, so we're still playing catch-up.

As in the '08 version, this one showcases pig employees, these two accomplished square dancers who are sweet on each other. He's a kitchen-pig with a paper hat, she's a waitress with a bow stapled to her head, and together they make sweet, America-flavored music.

It's important to understand that the pigs are not merely grateful victims. They are presented as authorities, speaking and acting on behalf of some putative restaurant.

When they do-si-do from behind the counter, they are saying—with every flirty glance and well placed trotter—that they exist to serve. To serve you your lunch on a tray, and to live out their subservience by being served.







Addendum: For the 26th annual festival, in 2009, they went with a countrified crooner, instead of café staff. Presumably, he's drawling about the gritty joys of being eaten.

Addendum 2: Somewhere between the 25th and the 26th festival, the organizers dropped the anniversary from the title and replaced it with annual. Is this meaningful? Meaningful? Now it has to be meaningful?!

Adega do Rossio

It's a happy woodland reunion and you're invited! Pull up a seat with the wolf (we guess) and the crow. The pig's been in the kitchen all morning and the chicken's dead, plucked, and ready.

This scene, found in the window of a Lisbon eatery, soothes us with its mood of quiet sylvan harmony. The players are so content, so amiable, each so satisfied with his lot. The wolf (we guess) prepares to feed, the crow to scavenge on the remains, the pig to serve with obsequience, and the chicken to be destroyed.

Every niche in the forest is filled. Every relationship finds its full expression. The woods ring with sheer, blessed systematic rationale. The sacrifice we witness is a celebration of reason!

(Thanks to Dr. Ana for the referral and the photo.)






Addendum: This isn't the first plucked sexpot we've seen. Far from it. There was her. And them, of course. And then, oh dear. Yes, there were these two birds.

Le Cornichon

If you're like most sex-crazed monsters bent on the destruction of everything sensible minds hold dear, when you think of fine French cuisine, you think of goosewomen offering up their legs for your consumption.

Like a cross between the Martini Bitter ads and the horrors of Rachachuros, this lovingly crafted portrait of a buxom half-goose, half-Marie Antoinette simultaneously titillates and shames.

She sits in her boudoir, waiting for us, petticoats splayed to bare those long, long legs, luxuriously anticipating the moment when we come to her, predatory gourmands, eyes alight with longing, hunger straining our nerves, and hack off her leg and eat it.

It's such a welter of conflicting themes it could occupy a cadre of psychoanalysts for months. Bestiality, cannibalism, good old-fashioned suicidefoodist denial: they all jostle for space in a scrum of specious propositions.

Is she woman? Is she goose? Is she food? She's all three, a feathered, smooth-skinned, avian, bosomed entrée! Her gleaming shoes are even garnished with parsley!












Lest you think Le Cornichon cares only for sexualized food, these images remind us that the suicidefoodist's reach extends farther than regal floozies.

Figures from history, figures bespeaking the finer things—these too can be coaxed into the same paradoxical machine, which can anthropomorphize and dehumanize at the same time.

And so, Napoleon is recast, improbably, as a squid (one with the erroneous, dumbbell-pupiled eye of an octopus) and a vintner as a rooster.

The artisan, the emperor, the princess all wish to be like you—to be better than you!—and also to be cast down in your sight as mere stuff.

Australian Pig Farmers

This darling little thing is happy because he has the best of both worlds: A free-ranging existence and the death that will cut it short to satisfy the needs of the humans who cherish him.

The trusting pig is too innocent to understand the crucial difference between free range and free.

And so, uncomprehending, he leans on the banner that signifies his captivity.

Live from the Turkey Necropolis

Just in time for just barely missing Thanksgiving comes this video sure to set your funny bone to tingling and your soul to throwing up all over itself.

On the stage in the teeming, maddening turkey necropolis, temple to the Soon-to-Be-Delivered-from-the-Horror-They-Loved-So-Well, the comic reaches right into his audience's hearts. For nearly three minutes, he nails his routine, calling out a string of phrases ("Christmas dinner," "I've got a carving knife," "Anybody got any giblets?") that send the turkeys in the packed auditorium into gales of laughter reflexive cackling.

It's like we've always said: turkeys might prefer their stand-up comedy tedious and juvenile, but they sure do like dying. They like everything about it, from the act itself to the implements that bring it about, to the sprawling deatharium that is their home until it happens.

(Thanks to Dr. Meave for the referral.)

Lil' Gobblers Turkey Bites

We've got some kind of garbled messaging going on. To wit, who are the lil' gobblers, exactly?

In a nod to the much-discussed doctrine of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation (last mentioned here), consumer and consumed are deliberately confused, creating a mish-mash of signifiers. That is, are the lil' gobblers the (no longer gobbling) turkeys or the little eaters in Mr. and Mrs. America's brood?

However we interpret the semantic muddle, the turkey's content. Waving a wing at the proceedings, the turkey is poised and cheerful. So what if the gobbler is to be gobbled? It's an accomplishment—is it not?—to be chunked and breaded thus, and fed to children.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the gobblers everywhere.







Addendum: Reminisce with the line-up of Thanksgivings gone by: 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Packard's: a Festival of Cruelty Special Report

The most recent installment in our Festival of Cruelty series wasn't that long ago, and we won't be due for the next scheduled episode for another six weeks or so. But we can't sit on this any longer. We have been seeking images of the (Northampton, Massachusetts) Packard's menu for months and we finally have them.

From the moment we first glimpsed the menu, a year and a half ago, the memory has haunted us. And seeing these images again reminds us of how we became obsessed.

Like other exhibits from the ongoing Festival of Cruelty, these showcase a raw meanness, an iconoclastic blatancy. To go out of your way to demonize and brutalize the animals who became your food, to treat them as utterly undeserving of any but the harshest treatment… Well, it's practically thrilling. Because it's entirely unnecessary—the animals are dead, the food they were made into is in the ovens even now—it has the power to grab us by the throat and insist that we take note.

And take note we did!

We saw the chicken immobilized in a contraption straight out of a supervillain's daydream, its wings about to be buzz-sawed off, to land in baskets filled with the limbs of previous victims. The chicken, paralyzed in mute horror, holds up a sign reading "Why?!" As any "food" animal should know, the answer is, "Because they can."

Below the de-winger is a scene of true depravity: amid the stink of rotting carcasses, beloved figures from our collective childhood huddle outside a Bates Hotel for unsuspecting animals, their legs and wings amputated, their stumps bleeding through the bandages. (It's the in-your-face flipside of this old post.) We've seen "food" animal amputations before (here, for instance, and here), but it's presented by Packard's with such stinging spite that it seems brand-new. Sesame Street's Count Von Count mocks Big Bird's phantom limbs. And do you see the posters on the brick wall? Packard's wants Foghorn Leghorn and Baby Huey so they can hack them apart too!

Animals on crutches, animals pushing themselves around in wheeled boxes, animals slowly dying. On a menu? At a place where you're going to eat? On purpose?

We want you to see the other Packard's menu art. (Click the images to see them bigger.) Like the tableau above, they're positively brimming with an unstinting hatred for animals.

Cruz-In-BBQ

It's the Nice Rack pig, taking a break from his coyly misogynistic personality to scold his consumer, taunting him to eat, eat, eat, eat!

If his sister isn't enough to fill you up, give his brother a look. If that doesn't do the trick, try his mother. And if you still want more, he's waiting for you, the gleam of a challenge in his eye.

"If you don't get full... It's your own fault!"

Standing there amid the flames, he knows that you have no one to blame for your gnawing hunger but yourself. He and his kind have offered themselves to you. They've invited you to cruise on in and partake. What more do you need from them? What more would you have them do? These meals animals are bending over backward to get eaten! Do they need to pay you? Is that what it's going to come to?

Oh, they'll do it. Look at this one. He'll stop at nothing. Nothing!

Agnomarket

Adorably wandering the aisles of an Athens supermarket (uperagora) comes the little woolly lamb.

In his adorable overalls he comes. With his adorable toolbelt he comes.

Adorably, he is employed by the market. To provide whatever the customers require. Directions to the olives? Yes, yes, of course. Wet spill by the fresh-made baklava? Certainly. The men's toilet out of order? He'll get right to work on it.

He is the adorable epitome of service. He exists only to give.

And at the end of his shift, he'll give his last. Whether in the form of souvlaki or kleftiko, or any of the multitude of dishes with which the Greeks pay him tribute—the market is even named after him and his flesh!—he will at last, adorably wide-eyed, surrender.

(Thanks to Dr. Vez for the referral and the photo.)

Pepe Pincho

You know who's not a loser?

Any "food" animal in a day-glo get-up—with matching hat!—endorsing an establishment that wants to see it dead and stuck on a skewer.

That's who.

To review: This pig and chicken, chums to the (imminent) end, are not losers. They are the (temporarily) living, breathing embodiments of "winner."